Fact-Check of Viral Climate Misinformation Quietly Removed From Facebook

Judd Legum and Emily Atkin, jointly reporting for Popular Information and Heated:

Shortly after the email was sent to top Facebook executives, Science Feedback’s fact-check was removed from The Daily Wire article. According to Facebook’s policy, a rating should only be removed if: 1. The fact-checker determines their initial rating of the was wrong, or 2. The factual errors in the article are corrected.

In this case, neither occurred. Science Feedback is standing by its fact-check of The Daily Wire. It is still the featured fact-check on its homepage. And The Daily Wire did not correct the article. Instead, at the very bottom of the article, The Daily Wire briefly summarized Science Feedback’s fact-check and provided a link. […]

But Science Feedback removed the rating from The Daily Wire anyway. Emmanuel Vincent, the founder and director of Science Feedback, acknowledged that, normally, articles need “to be corrected with a prominent correction notice” to have a rating removed. Vincent said that, in this case, the link appended to the end of the article was “barely sufficient” because the initial rating was “partly false.”

Facebook ought to start putting dick quotes around “fact-check”, then they can just say they’re not really fact-checks, they’re just fake fact-checks.

★ Monday, 20 July 2020